


The Vast Glub

by InkSkratches



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-18
Updated: 2012-08-18
Packaged: 2017-11-12 09:13:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSkratches/pseuds/InkSkratches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“<i>i am an empress. the world is mine.</i>”</p><p>She smiles in return. </p><p>“You’re playing at control. But it’s never something you can have.”</p><p>“<i>there is nothing i can’t touch.</i>”</p><p>Her smile widens. “You’re wrong.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Vast Glub

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Vast Glub](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/10976) by Kris "Astartus" Flacke. 



You remember, somewhere, in the back of your mind, the ghost of a conversation you had with the ghost of a girl on a ghost of a world. She’s someone you do not know, or have only a vague recollection of knowing. But you walk as if friends, arm in arm. In all your life you can’t remember touching like that. The warmth of the crook of her elbow, the softness of her velvety blue sleeve against your bare gray skin. You pass together through twisted blue branches, high above the ground. Your home world. But it’s different. Things are off. There’s only one moon in the sky. The world below, should you happen to look down, dissolves into smears of blue and black. Like you’re treading on an unfinished painting.

She always says things to you. You watch her lips move, enjoy the comforting curve of her painted cobalt smile. As if she’s trying to explain. But none of it makes sense. And that causes the bile to rise in your throat. 

“I’m an Empress,” you tell her. But your tongue is glued fast to the roof of your mouth. Your lips sewn shut.

She takes you by the shoulders. And suddenly her words ring clear, with a kind of familiarity that you can’t quite place. Like it’s a voice you’ve heard before. Or dreamed. And always she says the same thing.

“It’s not yours to control.”

She says something then. Something that makes your ears sting and roar and bleed the fuchsia blood of your station. You look at her, eyes wide. Mortified. You clap your hands over your fins and feel your face crumple. Twist into an ugly rage that keeps twisting. Jaws balloon out from under your eyes, gray but rapidly draining of color. And you feel the braids at your back curl over your shoulders and take life. And then they are multiplying. Splitting and growing and splitting again. Until you’re a monstrosity. A many-armed beast with terrible jaws. You lift her up and hold her close, this thing that dared address you so. That dared speak your name. And your maw trembles with the urge to bellow. To give voice to your rage.

But when you speak it is only in whispers.

“ _i am an empress._ ”

She looks at you then. Her smile is gone but you wonder if it might not come back, whether in mockery or reassurance.

“You can’t even use it. You know what it is, deep down. You know what it means.”

Your great body surges forward, tentacles thrashing at the branches, making the great twisted trunks shudder around you as if they were alive. Creating a storm of pink leaves. She never blinks, not even as your jaws gape wide.

But you cannot do it. You choke and thrash, and feel the anger burning inside you. You wrap your great white, curling limbs around the branches, letting the scream of cracking wood be your voice. Your power. And yet still you try, keeping your great jaws spread, heaving against the tightness in your beastly throat. Something comes gushing out. Not sound. For a moment you wonder if its sea water. But then you watch it paint the branches underneath you, slopping over pink leaves until the forest is a canvas of splattered rainbows.

Blood.

She’s covered in it too. Lost in the swirling colors. Only her eyes pierce through the dripping, marbling gore. And this time she does not open her mouth. She doesn’t have to. The words are inside you, vibrating from your core to the tip of each great white tentacle. Against the back of each of your rolling eyes.

_you’re afraid._

That is when the world crumbles around you. When the trees shatter like glass and great chunks are ripped from the sky, leaving only blank whiteness. Like your skin. And your limbs thrash and flail as you’re dropped from that unfinished painting, until you can’t tell your body from the swelling bright nothing of the canvas around you.

And that’s when reality returns. And you are an Empress again, your body dripping with jewels and the green slime of dreams. 

You’re never quite sure though. Even as you adjust the circlet at your brow and lift yourself from your sleeping pool, you’re never quite sure where the dream ends and memory begins. 

\---

You still remember the first time you saw him.

As one born into the blood of those destined to rule, your life is a long stretch of non-events. Sparks and blemishes of color. Tiny droplets of paint on the much larger canvas of your existence. But nothing that dampens the greatness of the whole. No thread of gold stands out amongst the interminable weave of colors. 

But you still remember him. Not as a thread of gold. But of red. A color you’ve never woven into your memories until that day.

He is small. A laughable toy of a troll, with tiny horns to match. You make some comment, some remark about their filed appearance. No, you are assured, they are natural. A mutant in every way, it would seem. A blemish on the face of the perfect kingdom that fits so comfortably in your hand.

You do not often go to executions. There are so many. But this is a spectacle. Crowds gathered from every corner of the desert, crawled out of the hovels carved deep in the forests. From land and sea they came, assembled in a sullen rainbow. And you as its crowning head. 

There would be no marbling here. Not on this day.

You watch silently from your perch, quickly boring of the theatrics. The tiny mutant speaks in one last desperate supplication. One last attempt to rally the strength of his allies. But he is met with a sullen silence, a forest of yellow eyes and orange horns. They rustle with uneasiness, but not the stirrings of rebellion. Never the stirrings of rebellion. Not with their Empress so close. The harbinger of death. 

For you hold the reigns. The crop and the whip.

Things don’t get exciting until the Executioner looses his arrow, and you watch the mutant blood spill. You lean forward on the polished amethyst of your perch, hair rustling behind you, slithering over your shoulders as if it, too, yearns to reach out and touch the burning red. It’s a kind of disgust that also whets your hunger, and you drink in the color of his death with wide, thirsty eyes.

That is when the tumult begins. When they finally burst through the crowd, three strangers that look dull on your eyes now that your sight has been cracked and laced with that candied crimson. You scrape the jewels of your throne with a claw as you stand, hair billowing about you, and you point with your golden culling fork. The very symbol of death.

There is no question about what must be done.

There are shrieks as the most feral of them, olive green and screaming, is wrested from the dying body of the mutant. The largest cry comes from him, as his life crests on one last swell, and he screams for it to stop. But not even the loudest curse of a final frustration can quell the surge of the crowd. Or the way red and blue energy crackles over everyone, laying waste to the indigo archers poised to strike. Only one is left standing, the Executioner. But he is content to watch as the olive wench flees with the stained garments of her leader.

That is when you descend. There will be no more mistakes.

There aren’t. You extend your trident and let your painted lips spread in a smile. The tightly curled knot of concentration at the back of your skull loosens, and you reach a ghostly hand to the depths of the ocean. It caresses the quivering jaws of the beast, your beast, coaxing out a whisper.

The psionic convulses and gags, and you smile as his psychic pulses fizzle harmlessly about his eyes. You’ve lost a good portion of the ruddy filth standing in the crowd, and you can hear their clotted, dying gasps. 

It’s no loss, you think as you stand over your prize, looking down at the thrashing, screaming, bleeding psionic before you. Your pound of flesh, you tell yourself with amusement, as he can’t weigh much more than that. Ragged, helpless thing. 

The excitement is done. Once the jade blood is also lashed and stripped, she is claimed quickly by one of your violet officers. It is of no interest to you. Not when you’ve woven a bright red thread into your memories. Not when you’ve earned a trophy of hammered gold.

\---

She speaks more now. Before it was just in cryptic tongues. Words you’ve forgotten or never remembered in the first place. But now she’s direct. Her arm still links in yours, but it’s with the stiff coolness of marble. 

“Why did you keep him?”

Again your throat is constricted. You only whisper. “ _he was mine to take._ ”

Her eyes are white. Vacant and expressionless. But a twist of her lips is enough to paint condescension over her face. You want to reach out and slap her. But you don’t. Something pins your arm to your side. Memories. A kind of disgust and burning in your chest that you’re unfamiliar with. So you just watch as those lips part and she speaks again.

“Nothing is yours to take.”

This time the laughter is so strong in you that it bursts out in full force. Loud and clear, a ringing that makes the pink leaves around you flutter.

“ _i am an empress. the world is mine._ ”

She smiles in return. 

“You’re playing at control. But it’s never something you can have.”

“ _there is nothing i can’t touch._ ”

Her smile widens. “You’re wrong.”

Again the anger. Again you mutate and grow, a monster, a white beast. You hold her to your quivering jaws as always, and hiss into her smug face. 

“ _i am an empress._ ”

She smiles. “Then raise your voice, great Empress. Strike me down.”

You try. But blood gushes from your mouth instead, and you are ejected from the dream, the crescent of her smile blotting out your vision.

\---

You watch with satisfaction as he is stripped and prodded. Aesthetically he has nothing of real value to you. He is like any other low class troll. You count his ribs from boredom, enjoying only the way they poke upwards as he arches his back in pain. Your violet mariners were never known for their gentleness. 

It’s his eyes that you find fascinating. Even as he is lowered into your ship’s bioware mainframe and the tube like tendrils curl around his waist, probing into his flesh, the contempt never leaves his eyes. Two tiny, mismatched embers of impudence.

Your only wish is to snuff those embers out.

You relish the game. Never before has one dared look at you with such bald contempt. It intrigues you, how he’s able to keep his flame burning even as the slick tubes surrounding his flesh begin to dissolve his limbs. Your favorite time to visit him is when the control nodes begin their slow attachment to every nerve. You tell him to describe it to you, fascinated by the way it makes him convulse and heave in his organic trap. He curses you at first. Spouts nonsense that he calls “teachings.” As if being with the mutant taught him anything but how to suffer. 

Slowly, however, he begins to break apart. Like a felled tree that is eaten away and hollowed out by squirming larvae and dampness, the pain begins to take him. You watch, eyes wide with hunger and intrigue. You’ve witnessed millions of executions. Had millions of husks implanted in your ship’s mainframe. But never before have you been so intimately involved with the disintegration of life. His screams gradually grow quieter. His spasms become flinches. And then he doesn’t move at all. 

But you can still see the fire in his eyes.

When the pain is gone, you become creative. You stand with him as you send commands to the mainframe, extending a ghostly hand to the throbbing core of the ship. You tell him what you’re commanding the vessel to do. You smile as the nodes attached to him fire precise impulses into his body. Making his synapses fire just so. Providing just enough energy to propel the ship towards any coordinate of your choosing.

He looks at you with wide eyes. If you were better at discerning the emotions of common bloods, you might have guessed what it was. Helplessness. He’s a child before you. Naïve to your power and control. You cup his cheek and whisper in his ear. It feels good to touch him when he’s so cold and frail.

You tell him he’ll do as you say, when you say it, and precisely as you mean it. You tell him this and then back away to gauge his response.

You’re delighted to see anger there. He’s not gone yet.

So you make him steer you to a remote corner of the galaxy. You open the conduits in his mind so that your sight is shared. It is through your own eyes, creased with laughter, that you show him your gracious side. The side that meets with the primitive creatures carving away at the rock of their homeland. You show him how sweetly you can lie before you send a command into his mind. 

He is powerless to resist as he transmits the order to attack.

You make sure to let him watch as the planet is torn asunder beneath the shadow of your imperial vessel. You stare at the way his mouth opens slightly, his eyes wide with the scene of a pearly planet blooming red until it is a ruby against the dark void of space.

A tribute to your friend, you tell him.

He snaps then. The troll who fought off a wave of your elite officers at the foot of his dead leader surges back to the surface, and you bask in the fire of his retort. 

He will never die, the psionic says. He breathed a flame into the people that could never be stamped out. His were teachings that would endure the erosion of time and oppression.

You ask him what he knows of the erosion of time.

He stares at you. And the petulance of his gaze drives you to extend your hand and show him.

He screams with the burn of it. Raw, throbbing energy, injected directly into the very core of his being. An agony so fresh that it shatters the numbness of his fragile frame.

And then he knows what the march of years can do.

He observes the second rebellion. The rise of insurgents on the back of a troll with wings. And he watches as you crush the renegade under your thumb, slaying all the beasts at his command with one well-placed strike of your imperial navy. He looks on as you harvest the lower bloods for their talents, embedding them into the hardware of your expanding fleet. He watches as you scatter your people to the stars.

When it’s finally done, you have already touched him five times. Five hundred years. You go to him then, as you have so many times. You stand on the coils holding his body in place, a limp conduit between two masses of bioware. You lean forward, the tips of your hair fanning out in the water behind you like some great tentacled beast.

He raises his eyes.

You see the years there. The sputtering spark that is his life. He can barely lift his head.

You extend a hand, life humming at your fingertips.

No, he says. 

A grin spreads over your face. You ask him if he is begging.

He nods.

The flame in his eyes is gone.

You touch him all the same.

He doesn’t even scream as his heart is charged anew.

\---

This time when she comes for you, you are waiting. You do not link arms. You do not let her lead you through the trees. You stand before her, feet planted on the branches, the leaves beneath you shivering with your own electric glee.

You are giddy.

“ _i have broken him._ ”

She looks at you. Her face does not mold into the mask of horror that you had hoped. She only looks vaguely disappointed. As if she finds your defiance childish when she is naught but a child herself.

“You have done nothing. You have taken nothing.”

You gnash your fangs, your shadow swelling over her figure until her face is darkened and you stare down at her from a great height. And even as you stretch your lips, your lungs and heart boiling with rage, you can only whisper.

“ _i have taken everything. his comrades. his body. his choice. his dreams. he belongs to me. they all do. i am an empress. i am control._ ”

“You are a child,” she spits at you, unfazed by the tentacles wreathing her body. “A scared little girl. You have no power.”

“ _the planet is mine. the galaxy. who are you? a figment. you can only mock me._ ” Angry bile leaks over the swollen, white jaws beneath your eyes. A low growl churns in your gut.

She shakes her head. “I do not mean to mock. I mean to warn.”

You pick her up, tentacles coiling about her waist until you can feel her bones creak. 

She does not flinch. “Why do you keep him alive?”

More bile oozes between your fangs and over your jaws. It begins to marble as it splatters thickly onto the branches, iridescent in the moon’s green light.

“Why do you keep any of them alive? Why do you refuse to raise your voice?”

You hiss, the liquid slopping from your mouth now bright with greens and purples and browns and blues. It spatters over her impassive face.

“The moment you chose to rely on death is the moment you lost your power. For what is death, really?”

She smiles.

You open your jaws, quivering. You try to scream. You tremble and force and heave until your eyes are bleeding rainbows. And then you lift her between your silent jaws and snap down. You taste her blood on your tongue. You feel her slip down your throat and into your gullet. But it does not satiate you. Her smile is burned onto your white, rolling eyes. You tremble, and the forest trembles with you. It leaps up into blue and pink flames, devouring your writhing limbs like oil.

And you scream.

\---

It jerks you awake, the sound of it. You clamber from your sleeping pod, slick with green slime, hair unkempt, circlet askew. You rush to the monitor in the bridge, the conditioned air burning in your lungs.

You already know what you will see. The coiled concentration at the back of your skull is limp and unfurled. Dead. But it resonates with the shriek of millions of years. Millions of births and lives and deaths. The reeling revolution of thousands of moons around planets and planets around suns, to every endless edge of the universe.

The knowledge of it rocks you to your knees. But you clutch at the control panel, fangs clenched and bared, claws scraping over the flickering buttons as you heave yourself up. Until you are dripping slime and saliva down onto the screen before you.

You already know what you will see.

The red dots on your radar wink out like dying stars. A black wave spreads across the galaxy, blotting out each tiny blip of life. You scrabble at the controls, pounding out the commands, screaming for a visual feed. And the spread of monitors before you synchronizes into a wall of darkness. And you can see your ships. Grand, proud vessels rolling listlessly in the void of space. Rainbows leak from their vents, crystallizing into millions of frozen jewels.

You wheel around and scream. Your command rips through your mind and into his. And he bleeds with it. Bleeds and howls as you urge him away. Fleeing from the great dark wave. The intergalactic roar of your own beast. 

The ship quakes under your feet as you stagger to the lower deck. As you slosh through the water and up the hill of throbbing cords binding him in place. You cup his face and bare your fangs and scream and scream and scream, lashing the whip of your mind against him over and over and over again until his eyes are rolling and blood is bubbling at the corner of his mouth. 

The ship glows red with heat as it sears across the dead of space. The red that once promised liberation.

That now gave it.

You never take your eyes off him. Not even as the black wave rips through the vessel. Not even as you force raw, seething life into his skin. Not even as his ears burst and his eyes melt from the goggles clamped over his face. 

You scream at him to live.

Because he is yours. Because you are an empress. Because you are the one with control.

He smiles.

That is when you know. 

It is not death he hears in the vast cry of your beast.

But freedom.

When the stars grow quiet around you and his blood cools on your hands, you realize what you truly are.

Not an Empress.

Alone.


End file.
